How an expert interview can help sell your services, product, service

In fact, a good expert interview not only helps you get N number of sales, but also gives you a plus to your company’s recognition and reputation. This method is so inexpensive and accessible that you can use it even if you have 10 people in your company, but only one is directly involved in marketing. Some budget for the organisation will be needed in any case, but these costs will be much lower than it is customary to spend on advertising. In the long run, and these investments will pay off, if you do everything right. Here are instructions on how to organise and promote what is called “step by step”.

What you need for an interview

1. In any case, you need an expert – a competent specialist from the management of the company, who knows the peculiarities of the market and understands the advantages of your product or service. It will require half a day of working time for preparation and half a day for the interview itself. The time is approximate, we set ourselves and the boss for it.
2. Budget. The size directly depends on the method you want to use for promotion. You can agree with a large niche media portal, pay for the organisation and placement. This is reliable, will take less time, but it is expensive, and sometimes very expensive. In addition, this method will not allow you to get an audience for retargeting, which means that you should not expect specific sales. Another option is to do everything yourself. More time to organise, but less costly and there is an opportunity to collect a base for remarketing.
3. Time and resources for the organisation. Here we take into account the working time of assistant managers, marketing specialists and all those who will be involved in the preparation of the event.

How to organise an interview

It all depends on the format. A video is more difficult to organise, but the resulting material can also be used to make a text version. In addition, you get additional opportunities for promotion on YouTube and social networks. By the way, there are some flyhacks that allow you to create very decent content in video format, but for a moderate cost. So let’s stop at this option.

If it is decided to pay for placement in the media, you need to find out in advance whether your partners have conditions for conducting interviews. Large portals often have everything they need (studio, decorations, equipment, etc.), so in most cases you only need to agree on the time. Otherwise, you will have to organise everything yourself. Then there are two ways: the right way and the wrong way.

The wrong way is self-production. Anyone who thinks that you can shoot everything on a smartphone (because it has a “good” camera) in one take and then cut it into pieces in a simple video editor is very wrong. Creating decent video content is long, complicated, requires serious skill and expensive equipment. You will not be satisfied with a “home video” from the height of a selfie stick, you need universal material that is not ashamed to place in any media. By the way, a fifteen-minute interview is about a week’s work: preparation, studio, filming, editing, coordination and correction of the finished material.

The right way is to outsource the production. In this case, you only need an expert and minimal time spent on organisation: make arrangements, come to the recording, agree on the finished material.

How to find a contractor? Do not call TV channels, it will be very expensive. The best option is a holiday agency (event agency). Through them, including, it is easy to get into show business, if you need, for example, a representative presenter or in the future want to do advertising with voice actors.

Lifehack. In every city there are small companies that are professionally engaged in the creation of video. They have 5-7 people on staff, have outgrown filming weddings and really want to work with the business. You can get a full service to organise an interview with a guarantee of the result for some 30-60K. The price tag can be even lower if it’s not Moscow or St Petersburg. In addition, if circumstances are favourable, you will get loyal partners to whom you can turn not only for the production of advertising, but also for shooting events with the participation of company personnel (exhibitions, business forums, corporate events, etc.).

A few simple tips on how to organise an interview with the head of the company so that there are no unpleasant surprises.

• Clothing. Ideally a strict business style, but focus on your audience and the objectives of the interview. In IT, a loose style of dress sometimes looks even more appropriate, but this is a matter of format. In any case, try to avoid third-party brands in the frame and no sunglasses, even if this is your manager’s corporate style.
• If a digital background is supposed to be used for the recording, check with the organisers what colour should not be worn. This is a purely technical point: studio videos are usually shot on a blue or green background, and then the “colour” is cut out and the desired image is added instead. If the head will wear a blue shirt, right on the set will have to change his clothes, and this is unnecessary trouble.
• Skin in the frame should not shine. Be sure to capture on the shoot powder. Plus to the budget of 2-3 thousand rubles, but it will be nice to look at the result. Ordinary ladies’ perfume is quite enough. Professional lighting often raises the temperature in the studio to 30+ degrees, especially if the room is small and the recording is long.
• Any mistakes, inaccuracies, awkward moments can be cut in the edit. Feel free to stop the recording if something is not satisfactory. Record the answer to a question several times, then you can choose the best option.

The duration of the finished material is from 10 to 20 minutes. It is irrational to do less, and more is tiring for the viewer (unless your boss is from the Forbes top ten). Accordingly, there should be 5-8 interview questions. Only relevant topics that are of most interest to your potential clients, no stories about the beginning of life and plans for holidays.

How to promote the interview

The first thing that is important to understand is that an interview with a specialist shows your expertise, but it does not bring a powerful stake in the sale. A potential client may be interested in the information, but he will not run straight away to buy.

The disadvantage of working with large niche media is that the publisher is unlikely to share metrics and traffic data. It won’t be clear where the viewer or reader came from, which means we won’t know our audience: neither geography, nor gender, nor age.

Besides, PR is more about communication and journalism than about attracting traffic and SEO-optimisation. This means that portal specialists will not study demand, competitors’ activity, collect semantics, etc. Special projects sometimes have such options and even give guarantees on traffic, but this is where the price tag is 700K plus.

Marketing promotion with the help of a PR partner

In 2022, our team conducted research on services and the cost of publishing articles, we interviewed the leaders of the IT&Digital media market: VC, Computerra, Khabr, Delovoy Peterburg, Cossa. In short, the conclusion is as follows: no one was able to explain what is the benefit of a one-off promo placement on their site, they only give the audience coverage and the actual price.

The actual results of the research are roughly as follows:

Nevertheless, it can be advantageous to engage with large media outlets. There are two mechanics of working with their content:

1. Post for free or at a minimum rate. Some portals offer such an opportunity. Further work with internal traffic. Portals have advertising offices, in which you can additionally buy traffic for your material.
2. Drive external traffic from social networks, contextual advertising systems, YouTube, etc. This is a more diversified option. We still won’t get anything in the retargeting base, but at least we manage the traffic.

Co-operation with big media helps to buy the trust of users. The result is an increase in trust and conversions, and the probability of a deal is higher with those leads we get through partners.

Marketing promotion without the help of a PR partner

Our interview means 40-80 hours of labour, as well as creation and placement costs. Content published but not optimised for search engines gives at best dozens of hits per month. Material created according to the semantic kernel is hundreds and sometimes thousands of views (depending on the topic). If you supplement the result with targeted traffic, retargeting funnel and funnel in messengers, then even on small budgets you can get the coveted applications and sales. And we’ll also have a remarketing base for future sales.

Why do you need a base? To interact with the audience for long distance b2b sales. Having a base of potential customers, you can constantly remind about yourself with short informative materials about updates and new features of your product or service. The costs are small, the warm-up is maximum.

What do we do with the interview? There are two ways:

Option one:

1. Cut from the full version of Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.
2. We add text there for optimisation.
3. We pour the finished materials onto the sites.

Acting according to this scheme, there is a chance to get good organic traffic. On a dead profile is unlikely to succeed, but if you do it regularly, the chances are great. If you do not get organic traffic, then we include the second option.

Option two:

In today’s environment, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and other similar formats are superbly promoted from professional advertising offices. If we manage to get something there, we connect a retargeting database and target these short videos. Then we add all of this to cold traffic and further down the sales funnel.

Special offer on marketing promotion

When looking for a portal to host and promote interviews (and more), pay attention to the following points:

1. Guarantees on traffic (targeted, work with semantics, competitors, optimisation).
2. Connecting advertising systems and building a product sales funnel in messengers.
3. Working with the audience through retargeting funnel.

POST AUTHOR

Pyotr Dzyuba

IT marketing expert